HCI PROCESS AND MODELS

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Human Computer Interaction (CS408)

Lecture

Lecture 16. HCI Process and Models

Learning Goals

As the aim of this lecture is to introduce you the study of Human Computer

Interaction, so that after studying this you will be able to:

understand the need of new software development models

understand the importance of user experience and usability in design

It has been said, "to err is human; to really screw up, you need a computer."

Inefficient mechanical systems can waste couple cents on every widget you build, but

you can lose your entire company to bad information processes. The leverage that

software-based products---and the engineers that build them---have on your company

is enormous.

Sadly, our digital tools are extremely hard to learn, use, and understand, and they

often cause us to fall short of our goals. This wastes money, time, and opportunity. As

a business-savvy technologist/ technology-savvy businessperson, you produce

software-based products or consume them---probably both. Having better, easier-to-

learn, easier-to-use high-tech products is in your personal and professional best

interest. Better products don't take longer to create, nor do they cost more to build.

The irony is that they don't have to be difficult, but are so only because our process

for making them is old-fashioned and needs fixing. Only long-standing traditions

rooted in misconceptions keep us from having better products in today.

Consider a scenario: a website is developed of commerce system. The site is

aesthetically very beautiful, technically it has no flaw and it has wonderful animated

content on it. But if user is unable to find its desired information about the products or

even he is unable to find the product out of thousands of products, so what of it's use.

It is useless from the business point of view.

Here are some facts and figures:

Users can only find information 42% of the time

Jared Spool

62% of web shoppers give up looking for the item they want to buy online

Zona Research

50% of the potential sales from a site are lost because people cannot find the item they

are looking for

Forrester Research

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40% of the users who do not return to a site do so because their first visit resulted in a

negative experience

Forrester Research

80% of software lifecycle costs occur after the product is released, in the maintenance

phase - of that work, 80 % is due to unmet or unforeseen user requirements; only 20

% is due to bugs or reliability problems.

- IEEE Software

Around 63% of software projects exceed their cost estimates. The top four reasons for

this are:

Frequent requests for changes from users

Overlooked tasks

Users' lack of understanding of their own requirements

Insufficient user-analyst communication and understanding

- Communications of the ACM

BOO.com, a $204m startup fails

BBC News

Poor commercial web sites will kill 80% of Fortune 500 companies within a decade

Jakob Nielsen

So all above given facts reveals that the product with the bad user experience deserve

to die!

Scenario A

Scenario B

Revenue Potential

$100m

User Experience

Good

Bad

Sales Lost

50%

Revenue Lost

$0m

$50m

$100m

$50m

Actual Revenue

All you can see that the real importance is of good interaction design. In above

example you saw that whole the systems which were developed technically very well

but failed just because of bad user experience, bad usability.

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So, what if we design a system with good usability and good user experience. The

result will be satisfaction and happiness. People will be happy with your product and

they will buy your product, not only they will buy but also they will recommend

others for your product. And other people will also buy your product and this will

result a chain reaction. So, as you saw how your product can be successful if it

provides a good user experience.

Our discussion has a simple premise: if achieving the user's goal is the basis of our

design process, the user will be satisfied and happy. If the user is happy, he will

gladly pay us money (and recommend that others do the same), and then we will be

successful as a business.

On the surface, this premise sounds quite obvious and straightforward: make the user

happy, and your products will be a success. Why then are so many digital products so

difficult and unpleasant to use? Why aren't we all either happy or successful--or

both?

Most digital products today emerge form the development process like a monster

emerging from a bubbling tank. Developers, instead of planning and executing with

their users in mind, end up creating technological solutions over which they

ultimately have little control. Like a mad scientists, they fail because they have not

imbued their creations with humanity.

We are mainly concerned with software, so, as we have stated earlier the definition of

software quality:

The extent to which a software product exhibits these characteristics

· Functionality

Reliability

Usability

Efficiency

Maintainability

Portability

As you can see there are many characteristics to measure the quality of a software and

the usability is one of them.

In fact, we can understand the nature of usability in two aspects

· Strategic

Tactical

Strategic aspect guides us to think about user interface idioms in other words, the

way in which the user and the idiom interact.

Tactical aspect give us hints and tips about using and creating user interface idioms,

like dialog boxes and pushbuttons.

Integrating the strategic and tactical approaches is the key to designing effective user

interaction and interface. For example, there is no such thing as an objectively good

dialog box--the quality depends on the situation: who the user is and what his

background and goals are. Merely applying a set of tactical dictums makes user

interface creation easier, but it doesn't make the end result better. Deep thoughts

about how users should interact with your system won't improve the software, either.

What does work is maintaining a strategic sensitivity for how users actually interact

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with specific software and having at your command a tactical toolbox to apply in any

particular situation.

Ignorance about users

It is a sad truth that the digital technology industry doesn't have a good understanding

of what it takes to make users happy. In fact, most technology products get built

without much understanding of the users. We might know what market segment our

users are in., how much money they make, how much money they like to spend on

weekends, and what sort of cars they buy. May be we even having a vague idea what

kind of jobs they have and some of the major tasks that they regularly perform? But

does any of this tell us how to make them happy? Does it tell us how they will

actually use the product we are building? Does it tell us why they are doing whatever

it is they might need our product for, why they might want to choose our product over

our competitors, or how we can make sure they do? Unfortunately, it does not.

Conflict of Interest

A second problem affects the ability of vendors and manufacturers to make users

happy. There is an important conflict of interest in the world of digital product

development: the people who build the products--programmers--are usually also the

people who design them. Programmers are often required to choose between ease of

coding and ease of use. Because programmers' performance is typically judged by

their ability to code efficiently and meet incredibly tight deadlines, it isn't difficult to

figure out what direction most software-enabled products take. Just as we would

never permit the prosecutor in a legal trial to also adjudicate the case, we should make

sure that those designing a product are not the same people building it. It simply isn't

possible for a programmer to advocate for the user, the business, and the technology

at the same time.

How can you achieve success?

The third reason that digital technology industry isn't cranking out successful

products is that it has no reliable process for doing so. Or, to be more accurate, it

doesn't have a complete process for doing so. Engineering departments follow--or

should follow--rigorous engineering methods that ensure the feasibility and quality of

the technology. Similarly, marketing, sales, and other business units follow their own

well-established methods for ensuring the commercial viability of new products.

What's left out is a repeatable, analytical process for transforming and understanding

of users into products that both meet their needs and excite their imaginations.

While thinking about complex mechanical devices, we take for granted that they have

been carefully designed for use, in addition to being engineered. Most manufactured

objects are quite simple, and even complex mechanical products are quite simple

when compared to most software and software-enabled products that can sport in

excess of one million lines of code. Yet more software have never been undergone a

rigorous design process from a user-centered perspective. The current process of

determining what software will do and how it will communicate with the user is today

closely intertwined with its construction. Programmers, deep in their thoughts of

algorithms and code, "design" user interface the same way that miners "design" the

landscape with their cavernous pits and enormous tailing piles. The software interface

design process alternates between the accidental and the non-existent.

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Many programmers today embrace the notion that integrating users directly into the

programming process on a frequent bias--weekly, or sometimes even daily--can

solve design problems. Although this has the salutary effect of sharing the

responsibility for design with the user, it ignores a serious methodological flaw: a

confusion of domain knowledge with design knowledge. Users although they might

be able to articulate the problems with an interaction, are not often capable of

visualizing the solutions to those problems. Design is a specialized skill, just like

programming. Programmer would never ask users to help them code; design problems

should be treated no differently.

Evolution of Software Development Process

Originally programmers did it all

In the early days of software industry smart programmers dreamed up useful software,

wrote and even tested it on their own. But as their businesses grew, the software

business and software business and software products became more complicated.

programmers

Code/test

ship

Managers brought order

Inevitably, professional managers were brought in. Good product managers

understand the market and competitors. They define software product by creating

requirements documents. Often, however, requirements are little more than a list of

features and managers find themselves having to give up features in order to meet

schedule.

manager

programmer

initiate

Code/test

ship

Testing and design became separate steps

As the industry matured, testing became a separate discipline and separate step in the

process. In the move from command-line to graphical user interface, design and

usability also became involved in the process, though often only at the end, and often

only affecting visual presentation. Today common practice includes simultaneous

coding and design followed by bug and user testing and then revision.

Design must precede the programming effort

A goal directed design approach to software development means that all decisions

proceed from a format definition of the user and his or her goals. Definition of the

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user and user goals is the responsibility of the designer, thus design must precede

programming.

Bug test

initiate

design

code

ship

User test

User experts

Design

Design, according to industrial designer Victor Papanek, is the conscious and intuitive

effort to impose meaningful order. Cooper proposes a somewhat detailed definition:

· Understanding the user's wants, needs, motivations, and contexts

Understanding business, technical, and domain requirements and constraints

Translating this knowledge into plans for artifacts whose form content, and

behavior is useful, usable and desirable, as well as economically viable and

technically feasible.

This definition applies across all design disciples, although the precise focus on form

versus content versus behavior varies by design discipline.

When performed using the appropriate methods, design can provide the missing

human connection in technological product. But clearly, the currently approach to the

design of digital products either isn't working or isn't happening as advertised.

Three dimensions of designs

Interaction design focuses on an area that traditional design disciplines do not often

explore: the design of behavior.

form

All design affects human behavior:

architecture is about how people use spaces

as much as it is about form and light. And

what would be the point of a poster if no one

meaning

acted on the information it presented?

However, it is only with the introduction of

interactive technologies courtesy of the

computer that the design of the behavior of

artifacts and how this behavior affects and

behavior

supports human goals and desires, has

become a discipline worthy of attention.

One way of making sense of he difference is

focus between interaction design and more

traditional design is through a historical

lens. In the first half of the twentieth century, designers focused primarily on form.

Later designers became increasingly concerned with meaning; for example, product

designers and architects introduced vernacular and retro forms in the 70s. The trend

continues today with retro-styled automobiles such as the PT Cruiser. Today,

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information designers continue the focus on meaning to include the design of usable

content.

Within the last fifteen years a growing group of designers have begun to talk about

behavior: the dynamic ways that software-enabled products interact directly with

users.

These concerns (form, meaning and behavior) are not exclusive. Interactive products

must have each in some measure; software applications focus more on behavior and

form, with less demand on content; web sites and kiosks focus more on content and

form, with less sophisticated behaviors.

Definition interaction design

Simply put, interaction design is the definition and design of the behavior of artifacts,

environment, and systems, as well as the formal elements that communicate that

behavior. Unlike, traditional design disciplines, whose focus has historically been on

form and, more recently, on content and meaning, interaction design seeks first to

plan and describe how things behave and then, as necessary, to describe the most

effective form to communicate those behaviors.

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